A parallel file system is utilized for supporting an excessive file request resulted from a parallel application in a cluster system. It uses traditional communication protocols like TCP/IP or UDP/IP that were designed for Wide Area Networks (WANs). For a cluster system, however, these protocols are inappropriate for its large scale of network overhead.

In accordance with this problem, we propose a Hybrid Channel Model(HCM) for inter-cluster communication protocol. In a parallel file system, messages can be classified as control messages and file data block. Therefore, we divided a message channel into two parts, a control message channel and data channel. The first is used for transferring the control messages, while the last is used for transferring the file data blocks. For the message channel, TCP/IP is used as a communication protocol, and Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) is used for data blocks. In tests, the proposed channel model exhibited a considerably improved performance.